An
address by Alexander Solzhenitsyn , delivered at the dedication of the Memorial
de la Vendée
in Les Lucs-sur-Boulogne, France, on September 25, 1993:

Mr.
President of the General Council of the Vendée, Respected Vendéans:

Two
thirds of a century ago, while still a boy, I read with admiration about the
courageous and desperate uprising of the Vendée. But never could I have
dreamed that in my later years I would have the honor of dedicating a memorial
to the heroes and victims of that uprising.Twenty decades have now passed,
and throughout that period the Vendée uprising and its bloody suppression have
been viewed in ever new ways, in France and elsewhere. Indeed, historical events
are never fully understood in the heat of their own time, but only at a great
distance, after a cooling of passions. For all too long, we did not want to hear
or admit what cried out with the voices of those who perished, or were
burned alive: that the peasants of a hard-working region, driven to the extremes
of oppression and humiliation by a revolution supposedly carried out for their
sake-- that these peasants had risen up against the revolution!That
revolution brings out instincts of primordial barbarism, the sinister forces of
envy, greed and hatred--this even its contemporaries could see all too well.
They paid a terrible enough price for the mass psychosis of the day, when merely
moderate behavior, or even the perception of such, already appeared to be
a crime. But the twentieth century has done especially much to tarnish the
romantic luster of revolution which still prevailed in the eighteenth century.
As half-centuries and centuries have passed, people have learned from their own
misfortunes that revolutions demolish the organic structures of society, disrupt
the natural flow of life, destroy the best elements of the population and give
free rein to the worst; that a revolution never brings prosperity to a nation,
but benefits only a few shameless opportunists, while to the country as a whole
it heralds countless deaths, widespread impoverishment, and, in the gravest
cases, a long-lasting degeneration of the people

It is now better and
better understood that the social improvements which we all so passionately
desire can be achieved through normal evolutionary development--with
immeasurably fewer losses and without all-encompassing decay. We must be able to
improve, patiently, that which we have in any given "today."It would be vain
to hope that revolution can improve human nature, yet your revolution, and
especially our Russian Revolution, hoped for this very effect. The French
Revolution unfolded under the banner of a self-contradictory and unrealizable
slogan, "liberty, equality, fraternity." But in the life of society, liberty,
and equality are mutually exclusive, even hostile concepts. Liberty, by its very
nature, undermines social equality, and equality suppresses liberty--for how
else could it be attained? Fraternity, meanwhile, is of entirely different
stock; in this instance it is merely a catchy addition to the slogan. True
fraternity is achieved by means not social but spiritual. Furthermore, the
ominous words "or death!" were added to the threefold slogan, effectively
destroying its meaning.I would not wish a "great revolution" upon any
nation. Only the arrival of Thermidor prevented the eighteenth-century
revolution from destroying France. But the revolution in Russia was not
restrained by any Thermidor as it drove our people on the straight path to a
bitter end, to an abyss, to the depths of ruin.

One might have thought
that the experience of the French revolution would have provided enough of a
lesson for the rationalist builders of "the people's happiness" in Russia. But
no, the events in Russia were grimmer yet, and incomparably more enormous in
scale. Lenin's Communism and International Socialists studiously reenacted on
the body of Russia many of the French revolution's cruelest methods--only they
possessed a much greater a more systematic level of organizational control than
the Jacobins.We had no Thermidor, but to our spiritual credit we did have
our Vendée, in fact more than one. These were the large peasant uprisings:
Tambov (1920-21), western Siberia (1921). We know of the following episode:
Crowds of peasants in handmade shoes, armed with clubs and pitchforks, converged
on Tambov, summoned by church bells in the surrounding villages-- and were cut
down by machine-gun fire. For eleven months the Tambov uprising held out,
despite the Communists' effort to crush it with armored trucks, armored trains,
and airplanes, as well as by taking families of the rebels hostage. They were
even preparing to use poison gas. The Cossacks, too--from the Ural, the Don, the
Kuban, the Terek--met Bolshevism with intransigent resistance that finally
drowned in the blood of genocide.And so, in dedicating this memorial to your
heroic Vendée, I see double in my mind's eye--for I can also visualize the
memorials which will one day rise in Russia, monuments to our Russian resistance
against the onslaught of Communism and its atrocities.We have all lived
through the twentieth century, a century of terror, the chilling culmination of
that Progress about which so many dreamed in the eighteenth century. And now, I
think, more and more citizens of France, with increasing understanding and
pride, will remember and value the resistance and the sacrifice of the
Vendee.